In the back garden of an old Kabuli house a sculpture cemetery was hastily improvised.
Retired Fine Arts professor Abdul Hai Farahmad dug the dirt, but it wasn't a
performance
.
Fear of the iconoclastic Taliban gale led him to make that decision as soon as they took the Afghan capital on August 15.
His 24-year-old daughter Zahra Farahmand is now on that ground.
"Art is
haram
for the Taliban, something that must be hidden," she says, referring to the Arabic term that surrounds the forbidden.
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The Taliban, under the shadow of the blasting of the Giant Buddhas
A few meters away, with nothing to fear from a possible cultural rage, he observes impassively the metal frame with a human shape that was going to shape another sculpture.
Father and daughter, authors of the buried pieces, completed the painful ritual destroying with hammer blows the rest of the works that they consider do not comply with the canons.
They recorded it on video, as EL PAÍS has been able to verify, so that it would be recorded, at least, as a complaint.
"When we break our sculptures we feel in our hearts the same pain as if we broke ourselves," says a small manifesto at the end.
Artists and creators live under the clouds of the new regime, despite the lack of a specific project of this for the field of culture and art, and they prefer not to think that this period resembles the previous dictatorship, between 1996 and 2001 The first signs are however disappointing.
If there was a known street art group in Afghanistan, it was ArtLords, which had made some 2,000 graffiti in 23 of the 34 provinces of the country with claims of all kinds.
Mural against the proliferation of weapons in Kabul by the ArtLords group Luis de Vega
One of the best known and most symbolic adorned the entrance walls of the United States embassy.
But a few days after the previous government had vanished, the multi-colored mural, which paid tribute to the first female orchestra in the country and a robotics team of girls that traveled to Washington, disappeared.
Above him there is now a huge painted with the black and white flag of the Emirate.
Omaid Sharifi, president of the group, estimates that a hundred have already been destroyed in these weeks.
“ArtLords has been carrying out these murals for the past eight years alongside theater,
shows
, documentaries or music festivals.
All that is now stopped.
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“I was painting on the street in Kabul with my team when the Taliban arrived on August 15.
The city panicked and we returned to our gallery.
There we destroyed several of our sculptures ourselves because I did not want the Taliban to see them, ”says the ArtLords leader from a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi, where he arrived after being evacuated with his family on 22 August.
Now he fears, from a distance, that this new black and white universe will end up completely imposing itself.
Zahra Farahmand on the ground where sculptures of her and her father have been buried after the arrival of the Taliban Luis de Vega
The onomastics of August 15 seems marked by fire by the constant references that are made of it.
Zahra Farahmand will not forget because, in addition, just that Sunday she was collecting her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
As a cultural landmark of those years when she was caught as a child, she remembers the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
Despite the fact that in the last 20 years the artistic world has freed itself from the corset, the most stale of the place never gave up in their ultra-moralizing endeavor.
He says that
Sharía
students once showed up at his faculty
to intimidate them.
Despite everything, Farahmand still wants to look forward: "I want to think positively and keep working, studying and learning English."
Also in dry dock is the theater group Sonrisas y Lágrimas, which had become known for performing works promoting the fight against gender violence or terrorism. Their concerns went further and were an active part of the
Fridays for Future
movement
promoted by Greta Thunberg to warn about the deterioration of the environment.
The Taliban have given the finishing touch to Smiles and Tears, but they were already suffering the difficulties of exercising a certain type of activism that was even risky under the previous government, says Abdul Basir, 23, one of the actors. “Once, four boys and four girls had to leave the Kapisa province escorted without the possibility of performing the play due to the violent attitude of some people,” he explains. If the patio was like that before, the young man is not able to scratch optimism anywhere. "Many think about leaving the country, especially the girls."
Omaid Sharifi still hurts the slap of that five years that embraced the turn of the century.
“I was 10 years old when the Taliban took Kabul and at 12 I started working on the streets selling cookies, but at the same time I went to school and learned English.
So I had a busy life under the Taliban.
I found my future reading books secretly from them ”, recalls the head of ArtLords.
Maryam Sadat next to a painting with the face of Christ made in cross stitch Luis de Vega
The activist and artist Maryam Sadat, 23, comes to the interview after having participated in a demonstration in front of what until a few days ago was the Ministry of Women and which now with the Taliban will be the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Despite the fact that protests have been banned since September 8, he says they shouted defiantly: “Taliban, if you want to kill me, kill me today. Tomorrow it may be late. " The president of the Peace Afghanistan association acknowledges that she has tried to leave the country, but has not been able to. His particular way of spreading peace throughout the world, regardless of race, sex or religion, is clearly a knock on the Taliban orthodoxy.
As an example, the painting next to him with the image of the face of Jesus Christ, including a crown of thorns, made in cross stitch.
"Think about what it is like for a Kabul woman who wears a burqa to leave the house is doing this," he says.
In its inclusive evangelization there is also room, in addition to Islam, the Jewish religion, Buddhism and even Queen Elizabeth II of England, who also has her painting.
Some are hiding in Sadat's gallery, located in a building now taken over by armed bearded men.
She, in her mind, flies high: "I dream of a woman leading this country."
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